Teem

Reflect's data-visualization platform has enabled Teem to focus on its core business—workplace experience—not building a data tool.

Overview

Teem is a workplace analytics platform for corporations. More than a conference-room booking system, Teem helps companies optimize how employees are interacting with their real estate. As actionable insights—e.g., which rooms are most utilized or who cancels meetings—prove so important to Teem's customers, Teem's product owners thought long and hard about how to surface these analytics to corporations in a tailored, interactive way.

Ultimately, Teem selected Reflect's data-visualization-as-a-service (DVaaS) to create reporting dashboards that are easy to prototype and deploy. "Using Reflect, we avoided assigning five engineers to build and maintain a data-visualization studio," says Dal Adamson, product manager at Teem. "Working with Reflect has been phenomenal."

Challenge

If you've visited a modern corporate campus, you've probably enjoyed using Teem's meeting-room management tool on tablets displayed outside conference rooms. If you work in management for that corporation, you've probably seen another helpful tool: Teem's workplace analytics around meeting-room utilization.

Being a software company, Teem originally tried to build a data-visualization platform, spending about year and a half with five engineers working full-time. Unfortunately, the platform Teem created didn't enable easy iteration. Says Dal, "Making changes to the visualizations based on customers' feedback was too difficult: It would take four weeks to get a new report up for customers!"

Eventually, when a key engineer moved on from the project, Dal declared, "Our business shouldn't be building a data tool; it should be building a workplace-experience tool."

Solution

Once Teem moved on from its own tool, the company looked at several business-intelligence (BI) software providers—Tableau, Chartio, and Looker—yet found their "embedded analytics" offerings overly geared toward business intelligence experts. "We have data coming from multiple floors in many buildings; with most BI tools, I'd have to create a graph for every level, which isn't scalable," says Dal. Teem wanted a platform for building data products for their customers, not ad-hoc reports for BI analysts.

"When I heard about Reflect and their focus on product teams," says Dal, "I immediately asked for a demo and pricing. Reflect's user experience is easy and lean—not full of fluff."

In one day, a Teem product manager can use Reflect Studio to prototype data visualizations for customers, get their feedback, and then publish changes. Versus the months it took Teem and their homegrown platform. And, according to Dal, software developers at Teem can use Reflect's APIs to "show the right data to the right customer at the right time."

Results

Reflect's data-visualization platform has enabled Teem to focus on its core business—workplace experience—not building a data tool. With Reflect, Teem could also relieve the five engineering positions formerly absorbed for months building their own platform. "I've never seen someone launch a product faster than we did with Reflect," says Dal.

He added: "Reflect is way more invested in data-visualization than we are, from integrating our data to helping us prototype and create products with it. It's not just about publishing reports—it's about scoping and iterating with our customers more quickly for products they'll pay for."